Patty Durand…ENERGY Updates From The Field

February is Black history month but I am going to start early. As I wrote in my last email, there is much to say about energy poverty and Martin Luther King Jr.’s efforts to improve the lives of Black Americans specifically, and poor people generally.  

On Monday January 22nd, Dexter King passed away at only 62 years old. Dexter King was Martin Luther King’s 3rd child. Dexter got to live 23 years longer than his father, who was assassinated at 39 years old, but he was still far too young. According to BET News, Dexter was named after Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery where his father was pastor in the 1950s and where much of the modern Civil Rights movement was launched. He was seven years old when his father was assassinated. He followed his father’s footsteps to attend Morehouse College, became an attorney, and continued his father’s message of human rights.

So let’s honor Dexter by looking at his father’s message for a moment. If you live in Georgia and haven’t visited the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park on Auburn Avenue, and/or haven’t toured the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church where you can hear recordings of MLK’s preaching, do it in February. I highly recommend it. It is moving and beautiful.

While I’m glad that Martin Luther King Jr. is celebrated, honored, and widely quoted, he wasn’t the peacemaker that many people think he was. Yes, he preached nonviolence but he also believed in direct action organizing, civil disobedience, and he was comfortable making other people feel uncomfortable by calling out their hypocrisy, prejudice, and hate. One of the clearest examples of this work was his Poor People’s campaign. While Martin was trying to launch the Poor People’s campaign in Memphis TN with marches and meetings supporting the sanitation workers strike, he was assassinated.

Much of MLK’s work remains unfinished, especially in Georgia. Let’s look at that now. Race is very much at the heart of decisions made at the highest levels of state leadership in Georgia – and by that I mean, ugly decisions. Decisions that are intentionally are racist. Decisions that harm the poor. We see that in Sunday’s AJC opinion piece written by those incarcerated in Georgia’s unjust and underfunded prison system asking for relief and offering suggestions. I hope Governor Kemp and state legislators will adopt those suggestions. Who better to know how to fix things than those caught up in the mess?

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Patty Durand is a Democratic nominee for Georgia Public Service Commissioner.